THOMAS JEFFERSON IN RELATION TO BOTANY
By RODNEY H. TRUE from The Scientific Monthly, Volume 3. 1916
During the years Thomas Jefferson spent in Paris, he was at the heart of
European activity and in the lack of newspapers he served as a reporter
on the progress of science for some of his American friends as well as
for Harvard, Yale, and perhaps other institutions. Among those to
whom he frequently wrote on subjects of this nature was his good
friend Bishop James Madison, the President of William and Mary Col-
lege, at Williamsburg, Va.
A letter written by him on July 19, 1788,
at Paris will show how well Jefferson played the part of scientific scout
for America: "You know also that Dr. Ingenhauss bad discovered, as he supposed, from
experiment, that vegetation might be promoted by occasioning streams of
electrical fluid to pass through a plant, & that other physicians had received
& confirmed this theory. He now, however, retracts it, & finds by more de-
cisive experiments, that the electrical fluid can not retard nor forward vege-
tation. Uncorrected still of the rage of drawing general conclusions from
partial and equivocal observations, he hazards the theory that light promotes
vegetation. I have supposed from observation, that light affects the color
of living bodies, whether vegetable or animal; but that either the one
or the other receives nutriment from that fluid must be permitted to be
doubted of, till better confirmed by observation."
The state of physics at that time is keenly illuminated by his re-
marks on light as a fluid like electricity. How inadequate the view
before the conceptions of energetics entered is shown by the remark
concerning the non-nutritiousness of the light fluid.
Jefferson closes this letter with a little rather debatable philosophy
growing out of this ill fortune of the efforts of Ingenhauss:
"It is always better to have no ideas than false ones ; to believe
nothing, than to believe what is wrong. In my mind, theories are
more easily demolished than rebuilt..."
In 1791 in company with his plant-loving friend Madison, Jefferson
had occasion to take an extended turn through the Northern States.
This opened to their eyes a new flora as seen in the first week of June.
Jefferson writes enthusiastically to his son-in-law, and fellow lover of
plants, Thomas Mann Randolph: "Bennington in Vermont, June 5, 1791.
Dear Sir: Mr. Madison and myself are so far on the tour we had planned.
After describing the battlefield of Saratoga he continues :
We have also visited Forts William, Henry and 1 George, Ticonderoga,
Crown Point, etc., which have been scenes of blood from a very early
part of history — We were more pleased, however, with the botanical
objects which continually presented themselves. Those either unknown
or rare in Virginia, were the sugar maple in vast abundance, the silver fir,
white pine, pitch pine, spruce pine, a shrub with decumbent stems, which
they call juniper, an azalea very different from the nudiflora, with very
large clusters of flowers, more thickly set on the branches, of a deeper
red and high pink-fragrance. It is the richest shrub I have seen. The
honeysuckle of the gardens growing wild on the banks of Lake George,
the paper birch, an aspen with a velvet leaf, a shrub-willow with downy
catkins, a wild gooseberry, a wild cherry with single fruit (not the
bunch cherry), strawberries in abundance."
The azalea here referred to with such enthusiasm, was in the opinion
Mr. W. W. Eggleston, probably A. canescens, first normally de
scribed twelve years later in 1803 by Michaux the elder. Had Jeffer
son taken the trouble to give his observations the form of conventional
descriptions, it is quite likely that his discoveries would have added
several plants then new to science.
